Film · 1979 · Films · 1970s
Breaking Away
Scored from 107 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Dave Stoller, a recent high-school graduate in Bloomington, Indiana, is besotted with Italian bicycle racing: he shaves his legs, sings opera around the house, and answers his exasperated used-car-salesman father in a fake Italian accent. He and his friends Mike, Cyril and Moocher are 'cutters,' sons of the limestone quarry workers whom Indiana University students look down on, and they are drifting through the summer after graduation with nothing decided. Dave passes himself off as an Italian exchange student to court a sorority girl, and the four are eventually given a place in the university's Little 500 bicycle relay. Peter Yates directed Steve Tesich's original screenplay.
Breaking Away (1979) is a film IMDb files under the comedy, drama and sport genres. It runs 1h 41m and carries a PG certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Inside comedy it is classed as Dramedy.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 546 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 107 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 114 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Breaking Away lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1970s (2,406 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 107.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
